XChange: Four Technology Forces Creating 'Intelligent Economy' - IDC

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Four new technologies are intersecting and will transform social and business relationships, IDC's chief of research said Tuesday at XChange 2012 in Dallas, Texas.

The technologies -- mobility, cloud, big data/analytics and social business -- are being integrated and rapidly adopted by companies, creating new ways of conducting business and building social relationships, said Crawford Del Prete, IDC's executive vice president of worldwide research.

"These four forces are coming together to create an intelligent economy," Del Prete told about 400 people attending the conference. "It's not one of these four forces alone, but how they interact with each other.

"They don't exist in silos. That's different than in the past," he said. "They are all coming together and transforming business."

This intelligent economy will be built on what Del Prete termed a "third platform" of these merged technologies and will drive industry growth through 2025, with millions of new apps and services built on "innovative mashups of cloud, mobile devices, mobile apps, social technologies and big data/analytics and more."

In the short term, U.S. IT spending growth is expected to reach 4.98 percent in 2012, he said.

But, Del Prete presented an outline for the future that shows marked changes in the IT landscape.

Cloud adoption will be significant.

From 2010 to 2020, traditional IT spending will go from 69 percent of business budgets to 36 percent; budgeting for public clouds will rise from 11 percent to 27 percent; in-house private cloud budgeting will go from 2 percent to 21 percent; budgeting for hosted private clouds will go from 2 percent to 7 percent; and budgeting for outsourcing will decrease from 16 percent to 9 percent.

Enterprise cloud adoption will result in an explosion of new applications that will be integrated with existing on-premise IT applications.

By 2020, 90 percent of public cloud platform providers will have technology that includes an app store and private and public cloud capabilities. While mobile platform development is now focused on desktop apps, "often as an afterthought," by 2020, mobile platform support will be the primary development effort, Del Prete said.

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